Age of Charlemagne
The '''Age of Charlemagne' lasted from about 768 AD until 840 AD. It began with the ascension of Charlemagne or Charles the Great to the throne of the Frankish Kingdom. It then ended with the fracturing of his empire during the reign of his grandsons, into the Feudal System that would dominate Europe in the Middle Ages. Charlemagne has been called with considerable justification the "Father of Europe", idealised by kings and knights throughout Medieval Europe. With Charlemagne, kingship took on more clearly the responsibility for the material, spiritual, and cultural well-being of his subjects. The Dark Ages were a long period of rebuilding for Western Europe and the Carolingian Renaissance he spurred was a crucial step. Yet his administration and cultural achievements were primitive when compared to those of the Byzantine Empire or especially the Muslim world. Centred in Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliphate oversaw an Islamic Golden Age; an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything that had been seen since Classical Greece. Muslim scholars translated the works of the Greek, Buddhist and Hindu learned men, and forge new advances in the arts, theology, philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, engineering and architecture. The prosperity, luxury and delight of Baghdad at this time has been impressed on the western imagination by one of the most famous works of Arabic literature; the Thousand and One Nights. History Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne (768-814 AD) The culmination of the Frankish Carolingian Dynasty, and indeed Western European history since the fall of the Western Roman Empire, came in the glorious reign of Charlemagne (768-814); latin for Charles the Great. When Pepin died in 768, according to Frankish custom his realm was divided between his two sons, Charlemagne and his younger brother, Carloman. Nevertheless, Charlemagne became the sole ruler of the entire Frankish realm upon Carloman’s death three years later; maybe naturally, maybe not, certainly Charlemagne disregarding the claims of his brother's heirs. Charlemagne proved a king ready to step out of the shadow of the Roman past. He was ideally suited to the role: he was an imposing physical presence, a huge man about 6'7 feet tall; comfortable with being a warrior, blessed with personal courage and adept at persuading others to follow him; possessed a keen intellect capable of making informed decisions; a person who believed learning was important, though he himself struggled with reading and writing; and a zealous believer in Christianity. Charlemagne's reign was dominated by military campaigns, driven by both the desire for conquest and an urge to spread Christianity. In the first years of his sole reign, he answered an appeal from the archbishop of Rome for aid against the Lombards, who were increasingly encroaching on territory around Rome. This was another significant step for the Christian Church appealing to the Franks for military aid, rather than the Byzantine Empire; at the time Constantinople was In the midst of the tumultuous Iconoclasm Controversy. He crossed the Alps and campaigned in Italy in 773-74. The results were a major extension of his empire into northern Italy, and a new title for himself, king of the Lombards. He also granted the archbishop of Rome temporal sovereignty over all the lands from Rome and Ravenna; the foundation of the Papal State that still exists today, albeit in a much reduced form. Meanwhile, Charlemagne was already engaged in his most protracted campaign, the Saxon Wars (772-804). Ultimate conquest was made extremely difficult by steadfast and resourceful resistance, and the decentralised nature of Saxon society. Whenever the Frankish army was occupied elsewhere, the Saxons would revolt, and Charlemagne in turn would punish the offenders, as he did at the Massacre of Verden (October 782) where 4,500 prisoners were beheaded. The main resistance leader, Widukind, surrendered and was baptised in 785, but it took another 20 years before Saxony was finally subdued. Charlemagne’s conquest of the Lombards in 774, had left the nominally independent Bavaria isolated, and it was forcibly annexed In 787-88. Thereafter, he used Bavaria as the staging ground for a series of sporadic campaigns between 790 and 803 that defeated and brought to an end the Avar Khanate (580-804). The plunder from these campaigns would finance the entire Frankish Empire for the next twenty years. Perhaps as important, it opened of a route down the Danube to Constantinople. Only in Muslim Hispania in 778 did Charlemagne meet with disastrous defeats, though even his failures would be immortalised in the heroic epic poem The Song of Roland. Nevertheless, subsequent campaigns would eventually carve-out a small territory south of the Pyrenees around Barcelona. Despite the hostility with Muslim Hispania, Charlemagne maintained good relations which Baghdad, even receiving the gift of an elephant from Harun al-Rashid in 801. By the end of his reign, Charlemagne had put together a realm bigger than anything in the West since Rome; the only empire in history to unite France and Germany, apart from a few years under Napoleon and Adolf Hitler. As well as a conqueror, Charlemagne was also an able administrator over his vast, ethnically, and culturally diverse realm. He was not an innovator, but made the primitive political institutions he inherited more effective. The central force of the kingdom obviously remained the king himself, who, when not on campaign, was based in his capital at Aachen, in modern day Germany near the Belgium and Holland borders, ideally positioned between east and west of the kingdom. Surrounding the king was his court, consisting of family members and trusted lay and ecclesiastical advisors, who would undertake missions across the realm to enforce royal policies, correct abuses, and rendering justice; the forefather of circuit court judges. To exercise his authority locally, Charlemagne still relied on the landed aristocratic families with dukes in provinces and counts in cities, as well as bishops and abbot who played an important role in local government. He made very effective use of the traditional Frankish annual assembly, in order to cement the king’s personal ties with his counts, dukes, bishops, and abbots; the forefather of parliament. The most innovative change of his reign was that kingship took on more clearly the responsibility for the material well-being and spiritual health of his subjects. In his role as a zealous defender of Christianity, Charlemagne gave money and land to the Christian Church, as well as protection to the archbishop of Rome. This is demonstrated in 800, when Pope Leo III (d. 816) got embroiled in a dispute with a faction of Roman noblemen determined to get rid of him. But who was qualified to judge a trial of "The Vicar of Christ"? The only possible answer was Charlemagne, who travelled to Rome and pronounced Leo innocent. In recognition of this, on Christmas Day 800, the archbishop of Rome dramatically crowned him the first Holy Roman Emperor at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome; after nearly 400 years, an emperor had returned to the West. What exactly the title meant is difficult to fully understand. To Charlemagne, it seems to have been meant to demonstrate his parity with the Byzantine Emperors. But to the pope it had subtly different implications for the future. By placing the imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head, the pope was carefully emphasising that the imperial crown was for the Church to grant, and what it could make, it could also unmake; Constantine for instance wasn't crowned by a pope. Charlemagne and his successors were expected to be subservient and generous to his spiritual betters of the Christian Church. As an evocation of this, almost exactly a thousand years later in 1804, when Napoleon had himself crowned emperor by the pope, he would deliberately seized the crown and place it on his own head. Another important aspect of Charlemagne’s reign was his cultural policy, that spurred a revival of learning and the arts; the Carolingian Renaissance (780-875). He gave prominent places in his court to a circle of educated clerics from throughout his vast empire and beyond: Theodulf of Orléans (d. 821) was probably of Visigothic descent; Paul the Deacon (d. 799) was probably a Lombard; Einhard (d. 840), a Frank; John Scotus Eriugena (d. 877), an Irishman; and the greatest of these figures, Alcuin of York (d. 804), was English. They were consciously tasked to revive rhetoric and logical argument, history and poetry, and to argue against theological heresy, notably Iconoclasm. The Carolingian Renaissance''' was also a great age for the copying of books, often sourced from Italy; a good example is the library at the monastery of Reichenau, which had 50 books the year Charlemagne was crowned, but 50 years later had over a thousand. The standardised for of writing used, called Carolingian minuscule, later became a basis for modern printing alphabets. There was also a modest expansion of the educational system, with young Frankish aristocrats at court encouraged to be well-educated, and efforts to educate the wider populace, but that was probably the least successful aspect; the literacy rate in 875 was barely any greater than it had been in 775. In Aachen, Charlemagne initiated a modest building program that consciously attempted to emulate Roman architecture; notably the Palatine Chapel, an impressive and confident adaptation of San Vitale, Ravenna. The royal example was quickly imitated in other cultural centres across the kingdom. In January 814, Charlemagne fell ill with a fever and died a week later. In the final years of his reign, there were already signs that his vast empire was beginning to dissolve, with increasing reports of the usurpation of royal authority by the landed aristocracy. Neither should his cultural achievements should be overstated, primitive as they were when compared with the Muslim Empire or the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless, Charlemagne enduring impact on European civilisation was enormous. It's with considerable justification that he's been called "Father of Europe", as something not just a geographical expression, but a cultural expression. Many generations of kings throughout Medieval Europe idealised and aspired to emulate Charlemagne, as the Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar of Christendom. His feats as a knight, both real and imagined, served as the ideals of chivalry. Even outside his own reign in England, foremost warriors of Charlemagne's court were incorporated into Arthurian legend, as the Knights of the Round Table. The centre of this new Europe was not the Mediterranean as in the days of the Roman Empire, but in northern Europe, not too far from Brussels, the de facto capital of today's European Union. Frankish Kingdom and the Carolingian Inheritance (814-840 AD) Although Charlemagne undoubtedly intended to divide his vast realm upon his death according to Frankish custom, he was only survived by one of his three legitimate sons. Thus '''Louis I (814-840) succeeded as the sole rule of the entire Frankish Empire. He had already shown himself a very effective general, conquering Barcelona for his father in 801. The fragility of Charlemagne’s legacy was clearly evident in Louis’ struggles to maintain control of the empire. He is often seen as inept but well-meaning, though really he simply lacked Charlemagne's instinctive charisma of leadership. Even more than his father, he believed that his rulership was a sacred trust sanctified by the Christian Church; he was known as Louis the Pious. In 822, he performed a public penance to ask forgiveness for the brutality with which a rebellion by his nephew had been suppressed. However, this only made him look weak. When this was combined with the Viking invasions which really begin during his reign, it exposed flaws in the nature of Carolingian rule; it was simply too large for the inadequate administrative structure. Meanwhile, his three sons began squabbling over their inheritance even while their father lived, and when Louis finally died in 840, it provoked an open war of succession. A division between the brothers was finally agreed in the Treaty of Verdun (843), a division of lasting significance: West Francia went to Charles the Bald (d. 877) which would become the later France; and Eastern Francia went to Louis the German (d. 876), the later Germany. Meanwhile the eldest son, Lothair I (d. 855), got Middle Francia, the richest strip of territory stretching from Holland down both sides of the Rhine to Switzerland and Italy, as well as the prestigious imperial title and the former capital of Aachen. Thus was created one of the great fault-lines of European history, over which France and Germany would fight all the way down until the 20th century. To this today, Belgium is divided between French-speakers and Germanic Flemish-speakers, and Switzerland has four national languages. The immediate consequence was the further dissolution of the Frankish Realm. When Lothar died in 855 and his eldest son soon after, Middle Francia was divided between Louis and Charles, with Lothar's younger son only receiving northern Italy. However, in all the Frankish kingdoms the authority of the king became increasingly diffused, through the intrigues of local nobles who drew more and more power to themselves, becoming almost independent hereditary duchies, paying nominal allegiance to the king. This was most severe in Western Francia, or France as we can now begin to call it, which bore the burnt of the Viking onslaught; Germany would hold together somewhat better, at least until about 1250 when it fragmented almost entirely. Nevertheless, the reality of France and Germany was as a series of nearly independent duchies. Thus the Feudal System that would dominate medieval Europe came fully into effect. At its heart was the fief-lord who had accumulated a large estate and whose prestige was based on skill at battle and a shared commitment to Christianity; at once power-hungry and idealistic. This was the start of the great age of castle building, as lords entrenched their power in stone. In return for military service, his knights or retainers were granted their own portions of the land, and an appropriate number of peasants or serfs to underwrite the expenses of the fighting man. In some places there were effective regional rulers who had tied to himself vassal lords, such as the counts or barons of Flanders, Normandy, Anjou, Brittany, Burgundy, Bavaria, and Saxony. Bishops of cities and abbots of monasteries too had their place in this feudal nobility. They were almost exclusively recruited from noble families, and held great lands of their own. Indeed bishops could often be found on the battlefield well into the 12th-century, fighting it out with the best of them. By the end of the 12th-century, the papacy had more feudal vassals than any secular ruler. Thus a pyramid of reciprocal legal and military obligations was created among the small feudal nobility. This was an exploitative and violent society; in any other part of the world these noble lords and supposedly chivalrous knights would be called warlords. Whenever feudal relationships broke-down, disputes were invariably resolved through naked force. Another excellent excuse for warfare was a dynastic claim to a territory, as generations of carefully arranged marriages and material gains, result in an immensely complex web of relationships. Meanwhile, lords invariably squeezed their peasantry and even occasionally terrorising them, but it was a controlled violence; a cooperative labour force was more productive than a resentful one. Nevertheless, it did bring a measure of order to society, that would gradually enable population to grow, trade to slowly expand, and new towns and villages to begin dotting the landscape. For next 500 years, great accumulations of power and landed wealth passed between a few favoured players as if in a vast board game. Nevertheless, Feudalism would gradually decline in the Late Middle Ages, as the military power of kings gradually shifted from noble fighting-men to professional armies, and the Black Death loosened the hold of the nobility on the lower classes. However feudal customs and rights remained enshrined in the law of many regions until finally abolished during the period between the French Revolution of 1789, and the Emancipation of the Russian Serfs in 1861. Byzantines and the Iconoclasm Controversy Having saved the situation at the Siege of Constantinople in 717, Leo III (717-741) turned around and unleashed a religious firestorm that would rip the Byzantine Empire apart for the next century; the Iconoclasm Controversy (726-842). At issue was whether religious icons of God were idolatry; "Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image" Leviticus 26:1. Unlike the other major religions, Christianity had never really made up its mind about it; generally speaking Judaism and Islam forbade images of God, while Buddhism and Hinduism encouraged it. By the 5th-century, Christian worship had firmly established a belief in the intercession of God through holy relics associated with the saints, and pilgrims flocked to numerous religious sites around Europe: Rome was obviously a major destination possessing the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul; Tours in France housed the bones of St. Martin; and Santiago de Compostela in Spain supposedly had the bone of St. James, although how they got there from Jerusalem is unclear. From here, it was only a short step from there to the veneration of holy images, and the line between honour and idolatry has always been notoriously difficult to define. In 8th-century Constantinople this question took on a desperate importance. During the dark days of the Roman-Persian War and the Muslim onslaught, icons and images had become something of a cult, paraded around the walls in time of war, and prayed to in times of peace. In all likelihood it was contact with the Muslim world with their strict prohibition of all images, that convinced the emperor Leo III to issues his decree in 726 banning the use of icons in public worship. So began a century-long period during which the Byzantine Church veered dramatically between banning and encouraging icons, between the iconoclasts and iconodule factions, which distracted and drained much needed resources and holding back its recovery. As the iconoclastic movement intensified, citizens rioted when soldiers were ordered to destroy icons with whitewash and hammer, priest clashed with monks for protecting icons, and common soldiers who favoured icons clashed with their own generals who didn't. In Byzantine Venice, the horrified citizens rebelled, appointing a local leader as Doge, and the Venetian Republic (726-1796) was born, both an occasional ally and inveterate enemy of the Byzantine Empire. This turmoil in Constantinople also explains the decision of the archbishop of Rome to firmly align the Western Church with the Franks from 751, rather than the Byzantines. The peak of the Iconoclasm Controversy''' came during the reign of the empress '''Irene (775-803), who would prove one of the most grasping and ambitious individuals ever to ascend to the purple. She first came to power when her husband, Leo IV (775-780), fell ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him. She then leapt at the chance to act as regent for her young son. After a half-century of Iconoclast emperors, Irene was determined to restore the veneration of icons once and for all. The legions, thoroughly iconoclasts by this stage, immediately mutinied. The rising was quickly suppressed, and Irene took advantage of the situation to carry out a drastic purge of the army. The legions could ill-afford such losses, and morale plummeted. Byzantine Sicily was slowly lost to the Muslims, and the empress was increasingly forced to make humiliating pay-offs to the Caliph to prevent him raiding Anatolia. Undeterred, Irene gathered more than 300 bishops for the Second Council at Nicaea (787), which officially condemned iconoclasm; this would be the last Ecumenical Councils to bring together the Eastern and Western Churches. By now Irene's son had come-of-age, but having tasted power, she had no intent of releasing it. A prolonged power struggle between the pair ensued, that culminated in 797 with Irene ordering her son's eyes gouged-out so brutally that he died several days later. Nevertheless, Irene continued to cling onto power for five more miserable years, spending lavishly to shore up her support. The end finally came not from within the Empire, but from the West. The news of the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 was received in Constantinople with horror and outrage. To the citizens of Constantinople, the only thing worse than an illiterate barbarian calling himself emperor, was the rumour that he and Irene were considering marrying. It was the last straw, and, acting at last, Irene was deposed by the mob; she was exiled to the island of Lesbos where she died a year later. Irene's reign had been disastrous both economically and militarily for the empire, but the series of weak and ineffectual emperors who followed her only continued the decline. With her death, the Iconoclasm Controversy flared up again, and would smoulder on for another forty years, finally expiring during the reign of Michael III (840-867), who proclaimed the restoration of icons. By then the Byzantine Empire was on its knees. However, like Scipio Africanus after Cannae (216 BC), Aurelian during the crisis of the 3rd-century, and Theodosius after Adrianople (378), a man would emerged to drag the Eastern Roman Empire into one last period of glory; the emperor Basil I (867-886). Muslim Golden Age During the explosive first century of expansion, the Muslim Empire benefited from some of her ablest military and administrative rulers. Institutionally, the early Caliphs left the societies they took over largely undisturbed, with Byzantine and Sassanid arrangements continuing to operate, although Arabic gradually became the language of government. The conquered were not antagonised by having to accept Islam, and religious and ethnic minorities were treated remarkably tolerantly. Nevertheless, many did embrace Islam, some convinced by the stunning successes of her armies, and others by the lower taxes conversion granted. They took their places in a strict hierarchy presided over by the Arab Muslims. Below them came the Muslim converts, then the Jewish and Christian monotheists, and lowest down the scale came adherents of other religions. Together with the standard coinage bearing Arabic inscriptions, and the revival of trade under Arab peace, it was the major evidence of the Umayyad Dynasty's success in laying the foundations of a new, eclectic civilization. By the early 8th-century, when Muslim expansion was reaching something approaching its natural limits, increasing social tensions heralded the breakdown of Umayyad authority. The numbers non-Arab Muslim grew rapidly, who felt alienated and excluded from the aristocratic society of the pure Arabs. Nor did it help that the later Umayyad Caliphs were men of poor quality, who had allowed civilisation to soften them and did not command the respect won by the great men of the dynasty. Opposition to the Umayyads coalesces into a rebellion headed by Abu-al-Abbas (d. 754), a man of impeccable pedigree; he was a descendant of an uncle of Muhammad. In 750, he captured Damascus, executed the last Umayyad Caliph, and was proclaimed the first Caliph of a new line, the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). The change had many implications. The Abbasids''' 'marked the end of the Arab Empire and the beginning of a more inclusive, multi-ethnic Islamic Empire. Support for the Caliphate was predominantly in the eastern Islamic domains, and this was reflected in a distinctly Persian style. The capital shifted to a city about twenty miles upstream from the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon, Baghdad in Iraq, which gradually became a huge city, rivalling Constantinople, with perhaps a half-million inhabitants. The machinery of government became more elaborate, adopting the bureaucratic system of the long-established Persian Empire, to become a tax-paying state with a central army; in sharp contract with Feudal Western Europe. There was also an explosion in trade that made the Arab world the most prosperous of their time, comparable only with Tang China. The Abbasid Caliphate oversaw an '''Islamic Golden Age '(786-1258), in an effervescence of culture unlike anything that had been seen since Classical Greece. Islam provided a political organisation which mingled Roman and Persia traditions, where Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian were allowed to play a full role in the community; far more so than Muslims and Jews would in the Christian world. They also brought a new openness to foreigners and their ideas, particularly from India, but also to a lessor extent from China. The period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the fifth Abbasid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid (786-809). He inaugurated the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where scholars with different cultural backgrounds were mandated to conduct research activities. The luxury and delight of Baghdad at this time has been impressed on the Western imagination by one of the most famous works of Arabic literature; the Thousand and One Nights. The international renown of Huran himself can be judged by the lengths to which the biographers of Charlemagne went to emphasise the mutual esteem of these two contemporary rulers. Schools were also widespread and the Islamic world was highly literate by comparison with medieval Europe. One aspect of Abbasid civilisation was a great age of translation into Arabic, which replaced Greek as the lingua franca of culture and learning. Thus the categories of Greek thought were imported into Arab culture, from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, to the mathematics of Euclid, and the medical studies of Galen. They also translated and preserved many Persian, Buddhist and Hindu manuscripts that might have otherwise been lost. This contact with "the philosophy of the ancients" had a profound effect on Arab and Persian scholars, who were able to build on this knowledge and forge new advances in many fields. Although Arab history and geography were both very impressive, its greatest triumphs were philosophical, medical, scientific, and mathematical. The greatest of Islamic mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi (b. 780), pushed forward algebra more than any other man since Diophantus (b. 201); in fact the word "algebra" derives from the title of his most famous work, and his name also gives rise to the word "algorithm". We still employ the "Arabic numerals" (strictly speaking they were Indian in origin), which made possible written calculations with far greater simplicity than did Roman numeration. Ibn al-Haytham (b. 965) made significant contributions to the principles of optics, astronomy, mathematics and visual perception. Arabic medical studies were dominated by Persian practitioners, such as Avicenna (b. 980), who wrote a medical encyclopedia called Canon of Medicine, which remained standard textbooks of both Middle Eastern and Western training until the mid-17th-century. The greatest Arab philosopher Averroes (b. 1126) made his reputation with his extensive commentaries on Aristotle, which popularised and pushed forward Aristotelian rational reasoning. The admiration and repute of Islamic writers among Christian scholars was a recognition of its importance. European languages are still marked by Arabic words: "zero", "cipher", "almanac", "tariff", "magazine", and "alchemy" among them. Dante (d. 1321) paid Avicenna and Averroes the compliment of placing them in limbo when he allocated great men to their fate after death in his poem, The Divine Comedy. Arab merchants also taught Christians how to keep accounts. Strikingly, this cultural traffic was almost entirely one way. The Arabs regarded the civilisation of the cold north as a meagre and unsophisticated affair, although the Byzantines did impress them. An Arabic tradition in the arts also flourished under the Abbasids. There was no Arab theatre, though the story-teller, the poet, the singer, the dancer, and the musician were esteemed; commemorated in European languages through the names of "lute" and "guitar". They also produced lovely carpets and exquisite ceramics, but it was in architecture that they truly excelled. The Arabs borrowed Roman technique and Greek ideas of internal space, but what resulted was distinctive. The oldest architectural monument of Islam is the Dome of the Rock built at Jerusalem in 691, a shrine glorifying one of the most sacred places of Jew and Muslim alike; men believed that on the hill-top Abraham had offered up his son Isaac in sacrifice, and that from it Muhammad was taken up into heaven. The Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, completed in 715, is probably the greatest of the classical mosques. Muslim architecture reached its greatest beauty and maturity in Islamic Spain, where the Great Mosque of Cordoba, commenced in 784, is among one the most beautiful buildings in the world. Many of the greatest names of Islamic civilisation were writing and teaching when its political framework of the Islamic world was already in decay. The Abbasid Caliphate gradually lost control of their empire, beginning with the peripheral provinces. The Abbasids had not taken risks with their success, hunting-down and killing all male members of the Umayyad family, but one Umayyad prince escaped the fate of his house, to proclaim himself Emir of de facto independent Islamic Spain in 756. Others were to follow in Morocco and Tunisia. Islamic Spain was to be of enormous importance to Europe. Despite the machinations of the Christian kingdoms in northern Iberia towards Reconquista, a fairly tolerant policy towards Christians remained. Through it Christendom received knowledge of the learning and science of the East, as well as more material benefits, particularly agricultural and irrigation techniques. By about 1000, the vast Islamic Empire would descend into a series of regional powers, each paying little more than lip-service to the Caliph in Baghdad. British Isles After the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the British Isles in the mid-5th century, by the usual processes of warfare, marriage and inheritance, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms gradually coalesce. By the 7th century the number has been reduced to seven stable realms: four relatively small kingdoms round the southeast coast, Sussex, Kent, Essex, and East Anglia; and three large kingdoms in a great vertical slices across England, Northumbria in the north, Mercia in the midlands, and Wessex in the south. Each of these larger kingdoms in turn was the dominant power within England; Northumbria in the 7th century and Mercia in the 8th. By the early 9th-century, Wessex was the dominant power under King Egbert (802-839), after ending Mercia's supremacy at the Battle of Ellandun (825) and taking control of Sussex and Kent; his son even married a daughter of Charlemagne. In contrast, the Celtic world of Wales, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall remained a tapestry of petty-kingdoms, in part hampered by the Celtic custom of sharing an inheritance between all the sons. Meanwhile, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity by competing Roman and Celtic missionaries had spurred an unusually vibrant spiritual life in England. The finest centre of scholarship was Northumbria. There Celtic and classical influences met: missionaries brought books from Ireland, and many Northumbrians went abroad to study in Ireland and especially Rome. It produced some of the most preeminent scholars in Europe; the Venerable Bede (b. 673), remembered as a great historian; and Alcuin of York (b. 735) a leading scholar at Charlemagne's court. While the Church in England soon firmly aligned itself with the continental Roman Church, the Celtic Church in Ireland would remain a distinct offshoot of Christianity well into the 12th-century. This direct link with continental Europe helped the development of the kingdoms in England, while hampered those in Ireland, and ultimately played a part in the English invasion of Ireland in 1175 with the pope's blessing, to bring the Celtic Church back into the fold. By the late 9th century, the coasts of the British Isles were dotted with monasteries, not yet rich by the standards of continental monasticism, but with sufficient wealth to attract a new group of marauders; the Vikings. The greatest thinkers of 8th-century Europe were both English; the historian the Verenable Bede (d. 735), and Alcuin (d. 804) who had a prominent role in the court of Charlemagne. By this stage, a synod of churchmen held at Whitby in 665 had pronounced in favour of adopting the date of Easter set by the Roman Church, determining that the future England would adhere to the Roman traditions, not the Celtic. Category:Historical Periods